Is it better to spend time learning new programming languages or study languages and tools you already use?

I have been thinking about a discusion on Hacker News yesterday about which new programming language people want (or need) to learn. While I definitely enjoy learning new programming languages by writing small applications, I think that I personally get a better productivity boost by reviewing languages and tools I already use.

In the last year I have mostly used Ruby and Clojure for my work. In the last few months I have read two books on Clojure and one on Ruby. Sort of: the more you know, the more you can learn and more deeply understand something.

Recently I reviewed the commands and read another tutorial for the screen utility that I have been using almost everyday for three years. Well worth the time.

I do a lot of work on remote servers and emacs is not always installed so I have also used vi for years. This morning, I saw a reference to learning vim by using vimtutor and spend 20 minutes working through the complete tutor program (learn by doing: you edit the tutorial as part of the tutorial). Time very well spent.

Comments

  1. Slobodan Blazeski2:10 PM

    Learning is (usually) easy, mastering takes life time. Seth Godin explains the idea well in his Dip book http://www.squidoo.com/theDipBook .
    At the beginning, when you first start something, it's fun.
    You could be taking up golf or acupuncture or piloting a plane or doing chemistry-doesn't matter; it's interesting, and you get plenty of good feedback from the people around you.
    Over the next few days and weeks, the rapid learning you experience keeps you going. Whatever your new thing is, it's easy to stay engaged in it.
    And then the Dip happens. The Dip is the long slog between starting and mastery. A long slog that's actually a shortcut, because it gets you where you want to go faster than any other path. The Dip is the combination of bureaucracy and busywork you must deal with in order to get certified in scuba diving. The Dip is the difference between the easy "beginner" technique and the mare useful "ex-pert" approach in skiing or fashion design.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mark Watson, author and consultant2:30 PM

    Thanks Slobodan, good comments! The 'Dip' is one reason I usually only accept work in a few areas that I am most up to speed on - but, I spend a lot of time experimenting (lightly) with many other technologies.

    I try to stay current on only 3 or 4 things at any one time, but these things that I put a lot of effort into change slowly over the years based on my experimenting and mostly on what customers want to pay me to work on.

    BTW, you mentioned SCUBA certification: I did this when I was 13 (my Dad had a large boat and he wanted me to clean the bottom of it of once a month). Certification was easy :-)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ruby Sinatra web apps with background work threads

In Java-land, I have often used the pattern of writing a servlet with an init() method that starts up one or more background work threads. Then while my web application is handling HTTP requests the background threads can be doing work like fetching RSS feeds for display in the web app, perform periodic maintenance like flushing old data from a database, etc. This is a simple pattern that is robust and easy to implement with a few extra lines of Java code and an extra servlet definition in a web.xml file. In Ruby-land this pattern is even simpler to implement: require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' $sum = 0 Thread.new do # trivial example work thread while true do sleep 0.12 $sum += 1 end end get '/' do "Testing background work thread: sum is #{$sum}" end While the main thread is waiting for HTTP requests the background thread can do any other work. This works fine with Ruby 1.8.7 or any 1.9.*, but I would run this in JRuby for a lon
Read more

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a way,
Read more